Monday, December 27, 2010

Misogyny and Genius: Assange + R. Kelly

Sent to you by moya via Google Reader:

During my birthday a couple of years ago I was posted up in Philly with Filthy in that awesome Barnes and Nobles on U Penn's campus.

The Roman Polanski rape charges were being debated in the New York Times and some folks were defending him saying that it wasn't "rape-rape", that happened so long ago, or the alleged rape victim retracted her statement etc.

I was perplexed, why was this White man not in jail for raping an underaged White girl?

I thought, if she couldn't be protected than my ass was grass.

I said this to Filthy and he looked at me, paused, stared at me for a minute, then said, well you know that's a real working class Black woman's perspective. I didn't really know WHAT he meant by that at the time, but I remembered it, because it felt like I was going to need to remember it. Feel me?

Black men have been lynched and Black women have been raped, historically, in the US to maintain the hierarchical, racial, gendered, social order. This terror was particularly acute 1880′s-1920′s in the south, as the US tried to figure out what a post slavery nation would look like.

Historically Black women are seen as UNrapeable. Naturally lewd, lascivious, fast and promiscuous. The social system of slavery needed us to be seen this way to normalize the domination of our reproduction and our manual work during US chattel slavery.

Because Black women were the two-fer, we worked in the fields and gave birth to enslaved workers, our sexuality was and in many ways still is looked at in a very particular way, even in 2010.